


Amanda Parson

by petersnotkingyet



Series: Love is Blind (and so is Kenny) [16]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Ableism, Alternate Universe, Amanda Parson is a good mom, Backstory, Blind Hockey, Blind!Kent, Blindness, Disability, Disabled Character, Divorce, Epilepsy, Gen, Ice Skating, Kid Fic, Parenthood, Single Parents, Stimming, Teen Pregnancy, This ones a little different from the others in this series, kid!Kent, teen parents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-04 16:39:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17308106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petersnotkingyet/pseuds/petersnotkingyet
Summary: Amanda Becker-soon to be Amanda Parson-was seventeen when she got pregnant.  Andy was only nineteen, and they were both scared to death even before the phrase ‘congenital rubella syndrome’ entered their vocabulary.





	Amanda Parson

Amanda Becker was seventeen when she got pregnant.  Andy was only nineteen, and they were both scared to death even before the phrase ‘congenital rubella syndrome’ entered their vocabulary.  They made her a Parson before she started showing, and the wedding was nice even though it’d been put together in a hurry.  Her dad gave her away, and they never talked about why she was getting married before she finished high school.  Amanda graduated, but she was on bedrest and missed the ceremony.

Kent was born on the Fourth of July.  He weighed four pounds and five ounces, and it seemed like at least half of that had to be hair.  He liked to sleep with his hands bunched up under his chin, and socks disappeared off his feet as soon as they were on.  He was the most beautiful baby she’d ever seen. 

Amanda was freshly eighteen, and Andy had just qualified for health insurance at the Ford plant.  The doctors kept telling them that CRS could mean a lot of different things, and there was no way to know how severely Kent would be affected until he got older.  He could have a single issue or a myriad of them.  At the very least, they knew he was blind, and it drove Amanda crazy how her mother kept crying about it.

Kent had his first seizure when he was four weeks old.  It lasted a minute and thirty-four seconds, but it seemed much longer while Amanda tried to hold him and the phone at the same time.  The 911 operator said not to restrict his movement, but it was hard to keep him from falling off her lap.  She didn’t cry until she saw how small he looked with the paramedics holding him.  Andy was at work, and they’d been at the hospital for an hour before Amanda could get his supervisor on the phone.

Fortunately, Kent’s seizures were infrequent.  It never got any easier to watch, but Amanda and Andy learned what to do when they happened.  Kent got older, and he hit milestones at the same rate as most blind children. His doctors said that was a promising sign.  Kent was very tactile.  He liked to touch everything, and he tended to flap his hands or rock.  Andy and Kent’s grandmother were always trying to make him stop, but Amanda didn’t see the harm and told them to let him be.

Kent’s personality really started to come through after he learned to walk.  He was very active, and he could figure out their attempts at babyproofing in a matter of minutes.  He was always into something messy—lipstick, flour, shampoo—and his laugh filled Amanda’s chest in a way that left her confident that Kent was going to be okay.

When Amanda Parson was nineteen, her husband said, “Let’s have another baby.”

“What?”

“Kenny should have somebody close to his age, don’t you think?” Andy said.  “We could have another baby.  I’m steady enough at work, and your mom would help out.”

“Do we have enough saved up?” Amanda said.  She wanted Kent to have a sibling close to his age, but the idea of having two kids by the time she was twenty sounded impossible.  “What if something goes wrong?”

“Babe, that’d be like winning the lottery twice,” Andy said.  “We’ve got good insurance for all the regular stuff, and we still have Kent’s baby stuff.”

Amanda chewed her lip, and Andy pulled her closer.  “There’s always going to be a reason not to,” he said, pressing a kiss to her temple.  “Just think about it, okay?”

Amy Parson was born on August 4th, exactly one month after her older brother’s second birthday.  The pregnancy hadn’t been easy.  Around the halfway point, Kent had started having more seizures.  He went from one a month to one a week, and his neurologist had no idea why.  The further along Amanda was, the more help she needed with Kent.  That left Andy to time seizures and dispense medications and talk to the neurologist, and the stress started to show quickly.  Every time Amanda went to one of her doctor’s appointment while Andy was at work, she saw the other women and their husbands looking at her, alone with a blind toddler and a baby on the way before she could legally buy alcohol, and then back at each other.  Waiting rooms became a special kind of hell where she would sit and wonder what the people around her were thinking.

Kent was obsessed with Amy from the moment they brought her home.  He loved to rock her, and he would set his favorite toys near her while he played.  When he spent a day at his grandmother’s without her, he would sit in the rocking chair beside her crib and tell Amy everything he’d done during the day.

Seven months after Amy was born, Amanda woke up to a quiet apartment.  It was March 9th, and she’d fallen asleep waiting for Andy to come home from work.  Kent hadn’t gotten up early and woken her up playing.  Amy wasn’t crying.  There was no noise coming from the baby monitor or the seizure alarm under Kent’s mattress.  There was no one in bed beside her.

The divorce papers came through four months after that, but Amanda kept her last name.  Kent and Amy were going to stay Parsons, so she would too.  Formalizing the separation meant Andy had to start paying child support, and that helped.  Amanda had a high school diploma and no work history, and minimum wage didn’t go very far.  Her mom kept Kent and Amy during the day while she ran a cash register at the grocery store and eyed the manager’s job.  Andy was supposed to get the kids every other weekend, but he always had a reason why he couldn’t.  He asked once if he could just take Amy, and Amanda was shaking so badly she could barely hang up on him.

Six months after she started at the grocery store, Amanda was assistant manager.  The raise the title brought made her feel like she could breathe again, and it came just in time.  A plainclothes detective knocked on the apartment door and asked if she’d heard from her ex-husband lately, and the child support stopped coming two weeks after that.  Kent was three and a half, and Amy was seventeen months.  Neither of them really liked spending every day at their grandma’s house, but Amanda didn’t trust the city daycare they qualified for to monitor Kent’s seizures and they couldn’t afford anywhere nicer.  Her mother was still trying to teach Kent not to rock, and it made him panic.  Then Amy would try to intervene on her brother’s behalf, and Amanda would get lectured about their behavior when she picked them up.

On her bus ride home from work in late December, Amanda Parson saw a flier for the New York Nightshade.  The pen in her purse was dried up, so she repeated the phone number to herself for the last ten minutes of her ride.  The next morning, she called before her shift and worked out a time the first week of January when someone from the team could meet her on her day off.

The ice rink was deserted on the day they went, but that’s what Amanda had expected in the middle of the day on a Tuesday.  There was a pair of elderly women working admittance and skate rentals, and no one was on the ice.  It took her a minute to spot the lone man lacing up his skates on one of the benches.

“Hi, are you Jamie?” Amanda asked as they approached him.  He looked like he was in his late twenties or early thirties, and he’d left a white cane next to his bag.  Kent had one like it at home, but he refused to use it most of the time. 

“Yeah, Amanda?” the man responded.

“That’s me,” she said.  “This is Kent.”

She’d left Amy with her mom under the guise of taking Kent to the doctor.  That hadn’t been a complete lie, but Kent’s appointment had only taken half an hour.  Amanda knew her mother wouldn’t understand what they were doing at an ice rink.  She barely understood it herself, but she couldn’t fight the feeling that Kent needed to be here.

“It’s nice to meet you, Kent,” Jamie said.  “I’m Jamie.  Your mom says you want to learn to skate?”

“Yeah!” Kent answered.  He’d never even heard of ice skating before Amanda broached the topic with him, but he was all about the idea.  Once she had confirmation that someone was willing to work with Kent, Amanda had pitched it to him as something excited and fast, and that was all it took.

Their hour of ice time went by quickly.  Amanda sat in the bleachers and watched as Jamie guided Kent around the rink.  He had more vision than Kent did, and they were close enough that Jamie could see to correct him. Kent was using the balance bar to stay upright, and he could get a good bit of speed going when he leaned on it.  He fell a lot too, but he always popped back up laughing.  By the end of the sixty minutes, Kent’s cheeks were flushed red and his jeans were damp from the ice.

“He’s definitely got a knack for it,” Jamie said to Amanda while Kent focused on unlacing his skates.  “Kids his age usually don’t do that well.”

“So you think he can learn to skate?” Amanda asked.  Her urgency didn’t escape Jamie’s notice.

“Of course,” he said.  “It’ll take time, but no more than it’d take any kid.”

“Would you…  Would you teach him?”

“Can I ask why this is so important to you?” Jamie said.

“I’m sorry, I know it’s a lot to ask,” Amanda said.

“It’s not that,” he interrupted.  “I like to skate, and Kent’s a funny kid.  I’m just curious.”

“My husband left us, and I didn’t feel like my head was above water until I was good at something again,” Amanda blurted.  She glanced down the bench, but Kent wasn’t paying any attention.  “I don’t want Kent to feel like he’s alone.  I want him to grow up with people like him, and I want him to know that he can do stuff like this, and I-”

“When can you bring him next?”

Amanda paused.

“I’m off the 13th,” she said, and Jamie nodded

“Ten o’clock work again?” he asked.  “I’ll try to talk Pete into coming with me.  He’s got kids, so he’d probably be good with Kent.”

“Ten o’clock is perfect.”

Jamie returned Kent’s skates for them while Amanda coaxed him back into his tennis shoes.  As they went to leave the building, he caught up and presented Amanda with a small laminated card.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“An annual pass,” Jamie said.

For a moment, Amanda was speechless.

“I can’t thank you enough for all of this,” she finally said.  Jamie just shook his head and smiled.

“If he’s going to be a hockey player someday,” he said, “we’ve got to do this right.”


End file.
